AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS 225 



the physical degeneracy of the peasantry. Herded to- 

 gether in cottages which, by their imperfect arrangements, 

 violated every sanitary law, generated all kinds of disease, 

 and rendered modesty an unimaginable thing ; driven to 

 a distance from their work in order to create model 

 villages, and congi'egated in ' open ' parishes, where they 

 were subjected to the extortions of house-building specu- 

 lators; compelled by insufficient wages to expose their 

 wives to the degradation of field labour, and to send their 

 children to work as soon as they could crawl — the peasant 

 had little cause in the past to be enthusiastic for the 

 land laws, the corn laws, and parochial relief. Disorganised 

 by his divorce from the soil, demoralised by the poor 

 law, degraded by insufficient money wages, lodged worse 

 than the animals, oppressed by the high price of neces- 

 saries, the labourer would have been more than human 

 had he not risen in an insurrection which could only be 

 quelled by force. He had already carried patience beyond 

 the limit where it ceases to be a virtue. 



The relative improvement in the present condition of 

 the agricultural labourer is enormous. Landlords have 

 spared no jsains to improve his moral and material 

 position. Labourers are comfortably lodged, and few are 

 without land in the shape of field or cottage gardens ; the 

 agi'icultural gang, public or private, is at an end ; fewer 

 women and young children work in the fields ; the abuses 

 of the truck system have been reduced. They enjoy 

 comforts to which twenty years ago they were strangers ; 

 they are better housed, better fed, better clad ; their work 

 is lighter, and their wages, tested by the purchasing 

 power of money, higher than they have been for centuries. 

 But slow-witted as Hodge proverbially is, his memory is 

 singularly tenacious. Deeply hidden in the recesses of 



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